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Ohio

It Is More Than Normal

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Whether it has been hot, cool, or rainy (and Ohio has been very rainy), what you can say about the weather so far this summer is that it is more than normal.

When you get a little more than normal of anything… you sort of get concerned about the impact. Like, is it raining cats and dogs all week? I start thinking about whether the disease issues that such weather brings will crop up. Whether I can get out into the garden to weed, as muddy conditions around here can turn epic quickly.

But after a certain threshold is hit, I come to sort of a resignation level: Que sera, que sera.

We have definitely hit that threshold in this neck of the woods. I already know that the weeds have outstripped my ability to really control them on this large place. That disease will hit, I just don’t know how hard. Things like that…

Not that this crusty old gardener is giving up the battle to have a productive and pretty garden. No, I am just biding my time, and re-adjusting my sights.

There are upsides to “more than normal”:

  • We have rainforest green and lush look all through the entire landscape.
  • No, I don’t have to water.
  • My cucumbers love it!
  • I was visiting with my son and grandson, anyway…
  • The late planted stuff has springtime conditions to get established long into June (and now July)

You see, life can always deliver something of a silver lining if we look for it. We will just need to refocus away from those ominous looking thunderclouds!

Lychnis chalcedonica
Blooms in part sun/part shade during early summer

What I’m Focusing On

For one thing, when there are open sunny moments, I enjoy sitting outdoors and soaking it in.

While doing that, one attunes to the many different birdsongs, and the flow of life around one. The other day I was very startled as one cat snapped up his chipmunk prey and then ran off into the yard to play with it. It was a brave and feisty little rodent and I am not sure how he fared,eventually.

I received an up close visit from a curious hummingbird.

The sound of wind and approaching rain over the corn fields, rainbows, and a fantasy evening of lightning bugs which dance in a swirl of sparks at every chance they get.

It is a great, wide, and wonderful world…

Eventually

The weeds will need determined uprooting, the damages of heat and humidity, and too much wet will have to be addressed. The sun will break through and the garden will dry out.

I’ll have to catch up and the weather will become the dog days of summer -fueled by all this rain. Hot and humid followed by hot an dry until we get some sort of respite in early October.

The seasons turn, and in the midsummer heat I will again hole up inside to write the suspended newsletters, to add more blogposts, and continue whatever progress I can make on my well laid plans.

Life continues and I am grateful to be part of it.

What do you do when you get “more than normal”?

The Big Chill: It was a Late Spring

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Wall flowers from flower mix planted last year

As I write this I still have heat on, a fire in the woodstove, although we are promised a summer-like, near-eighty degree temperature today. I covered my basil and the container plantings the last couple days against the frost warnings. Even for Ohio, this fluctuation in temperature is a little untoward.

I went to a plant sale last weekend that turned out to be quite disappointing for me. I overpaid for two weak, tiny pepper plants and didn’t get any of the heritage/heirloom tomatoes I was hoping for; however, my husband and I went ahead and visited the Whetstone Park of Roses to see what was happening there.

Not many of the roses were blooming. Of the old roses, only an early yellow rose had its blooms strewn across its branches like a strand of yellow cream pearls. But the stroll through the garden was informative and lovely in other ways.

Informative Truths

Gardens change. That seems to be the one truth about them over all the world, the one unchanging thing about a garden is that it will change. It is probably true about every other thing on earth, too, but it is most noticeable in gardens and in children, come to think of it. We see our mortality in them. But not just that, or it would be depressing instead of invigorating.

We are infused with hope and optimism when seeing children change and grow, as well as discover the bright and sunny side of life if we poke through a garden, even one grown seedy and weedy with neglect. In the Park of Roses, the garden is kept up and the changes are geared towards the public, improved for weddings and concerts, reworked and weeded for the many visitors that promenade through its walks.

This Season

In the Whetstone garden, a tree I remembered from the time I was a child, and later when my children explored its branches with curiosity, was cut to the ground. It was a very large contorted filbert sort of tree, not the size of the Harry Lauder hazels in my own garden. I now wish I had taken a photograph of that tree on one of my many visits to the park.

Some sad assortment of new things were planted around its memorial ground level trunk. I don’t know the story on its demise.  Perhaps caused by a variation of some of the same terrible trunk damage I saw on a very mature copper beech tree elsewhere in the Rose Garden. Still standing, but the tree’s days are marked in its large branch splitting off and unsupported, and the bark damage around the base.

I don’t blame the caretakers of the park, because all too often blind vandals desecrate trees and other things which they neither understand nor value. Or it could be rampant deer, or rabbits who took a winter meal under cover of snow. Or just the vagaries of nature. As observed… gardens change.

The Weather

 

Weeping Crabapple

I have been mildly irritated by how the weather has followed such uncharted ups and downs, but if a more reasoned state of mind is allowed its say, the crabapple tree bloom was spectacular. There were spring pictures of great beauty. The spring was different, but it wasn’t marred, just late and a bit strange.

It had its share of beauty, so far. I am not complaining.

Impressions

The scent of apple blossom, Carlesii viburnum, wallflowers, and L. fragrantissima converged into a delightful breeze-blown and spirit lifting invitation to truly breathe. I took great, gulping, greedy breathes and stayed out in the yard just to let the experience of the mixing perfumery of God fill my soul. I love times like that. I didn’t work on the weeds, I didn’t grab a camera, I took no thought of the computer or blogging. I just lived it, and wrote it in my mind’s notebook.

It makes me feel free to let go the need to document, or improve, or somehow prove I lived that moment.

Though here I am, telling it to you.

And I do have some pictures of the days around that time, so the balance of freedom lets something be created, something be left to share and to revisit when the ephemeral feelings fade and seem less real when more of life crowds in.

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© 2013 written for Ilona’s Garden Journal by Ilona E. An excellent blog.

Am I In The Wrong Place?

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Southern Ohio Hocking Hills, Autumn

My husband and I are talking about the future. We are at the age where we must think about the priorities of the end chapters of our life together… where to live, how to preserve our health, what sort of plan to do what is important to us.

And then, as I was looking at gardens that people make in all sorts of place -in mountain sides, in woods, in prairies, by oceans, in cities- all the many places, I started to think about my own preferences and experiences.

The story of my life seems to be summed up in the uncomfortable idea that I do not fit. And I have tried all sorts of ways to deal with that, and adjust to it. Almost all, except to move into something different.

My garden is quite an example of that. It is a prairie garden, sort of plunked onto a windswept plain. It is not the sort of garden I would have chosen if wishful thinking had been in charge, to tell the unvarnished truth.

I would have chosen woodland, with nooks and crannies, all the delicate little wildflowers, and stone walls and pathways.

But one thing I would have missed, had I not gardened here in the flat open spaces, would have been the feeling that broad vistas can give you In freedom and elbow room, the daily serving of sunsets and sunrises with almost unbroken horizons, and the long view of approaching weather systems. The unbroken beauty of blue skies with a myriad form of clouds, or the sight of rain falling at a far distant location. These are not things that woodlands or city venues can offer.

Did I belong here, or did I belong in that grottoed woodland that I am so drawn to in pictures?

Do we have a sense of place, or are we capable of finding a fit anywhere we please? Is this a general human or individual trait, this “fitting in”, and what hinders it?

I don’t know any of the answers, not even after all this time of living -now at the 60 year mark, and of gardening in one place for more than twenty years. Enough time to see the garden go through its inception and beginnings to its zenith of glory and now to its decline and maturation, needing to find its new form and purpose.

Should I move on to a new place, or should I see my old place with new eyes? I cannot decide. Perhaps because the clarity of the question is not yet formed in my mind. It has that vague and uneasy feeling about whether one is in the right place or not, whether one fits, and whether there is a place to “fit” at all.

My place in summer

No matter what the choice, as in all choices there is something to give up and something to gain. I think in someways it is all just a matter of relinquishing yet more of my ideas of how much control one has in life, without becoming too fatalistic about it.

In the meantime there is merit in the idea which stood me good stead in the past:

Bloom where you are planted

And the newer idea that is finding root in me at this stage of my life:

 Enjoy the moment

I believe that clarity will come as I pursue those two leading thoughts. And now I have a new garden season to busy myself with, and the old garden is going to be coming alive with new shoots and tasks soon. What insights will it hold, what challenges will it give me, and how will I answer? A secret garden to explore.

This place blanketed in winter snow

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Visit Ilona’s Garden Journal on facebook: Click here
© 2013 written for Ilona’s Garden Journal by Ilona E. An excellent blog.

The Butterflies Are Coming

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The butterfly exhibition is coming to Franklin Park Conservatory. Starting on March 19th this year, the Conservatory will host Blooms and Butterflies and start it off with a Butterfly Carnival.

This exhibition is one of the most entertaining ways to experience the Franklin Park Conservatory, although I think there is something exciting about all their programs. This one,though, is almost magical. The brightly colored butterflies from exotic places are most unusual and will land on your hand, if you are lucky. They float through the air in the lush Pacific Island Water Garden, mingling with the Chihuly glass sculptures there and the plants of a rain forest.

“Franklin Park Conservatory is the only public botanical garden in the world to own a signature collection of Dale Chihuly’s glass artworks.”[1]

Maybe it will impress you to create your own butterfly sanctuary for native Lepidoptera.
Butterfly Gardening
Make Your Yard A Destination For Butterflies

Be sure to see Gardens in Ohio.

Flickr Slideshow
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© 2010 written for Ilona’s Garden Journal. Copyrights apply.